Must women protagonists be role models before they’re seen as individual human characters? Writing for Think Progress, Alyssa Rosenberg considers the challenges of portraying women heroes in pop culture. “First, members of a minority group, or of a group like women that are a majority but are poorly
Travel to other distant planets is a central conceit for many videogames, from Star Fox to Halo to EVE Online. Being in an alien world gives developers an easy excuse for tweaking the laws of physics for the sake of fun and drama. But just how plausible is the idea of reaching another solar system?
For years players have created a roughshod kind of cinema using the games Halo and Splinter Cell, but rarely have professional filmmakers thought to use game design tools for their films. Shane Acker, who directed the Tim Burton-produced 9, aims to change that. He’ll partner with partner with Valve
The creation of fear in a videogame is an inexact science but there’s evidence to suggest a neurological mechanism can influence it in some important ways. Writing for Gamasutra, Maral Tajerian, a neuroscientist at Thwackel Consulting, explains the role mirror neurons play in connecting players to t
Quinn Pitcock was an All-American defensive lineman at Ohio State and a third round draft pick by the Indianapolis Colts in 2007. Despite the early promise of his athletic career, he developed an addiction to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare‘s online multiplayer mode, which contributed to his decision t
Videogames are beset with rumors and speculation about what secret mysteries developers are holding back. The process of keeping secrets, and determining what should and shouldn’t be a part of public record, is murky and haphazard. Writing in a Quora thread about how Apple keeps its secrets from sli
In another example of people finding interesting uses for Kinect outside of games computer scientists at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville have created a program that uses the camera to keep track of household objects. Shahriar Nirjon and colleague John Stankovic use Kinect cameras in ea
video Neal Stephenson has long been an influential figure in videogame culture, from popularizing the use of the word “avatar” in Snowcrash to imagining a geologically distributed gold economy in an MMO with his most recent novel Reamde. Stephenson is finally ready to make a game of his own and he’s